Posts Tagged ‘mind control’

The Force Trainer by Uncle Milton actually allows you to control a Jedi Training Remote with your mind, by tapping into cutting-edge brainwave technology. By utilizing dry neural sensor technology, you hear a special headset that reads and interprets your brainwaves and turns them into a movement of an object – just like a real Jedi. The deeper your concentration and the better mental focus you achieve, the greater your ability to move the Training Sphere up or down the Training Tower gets.

You’ll have to progress from a Padawan to Jedi Master as you master the use of “The Force” through 15 levels of training that increase after each other, making more challenging sequences, but thankfully you are being aided by training cues and instruction from the master of all Jedi Masters himself, Yoda. Additional Star Wars sound effects confirm accomplishment and provide encouragement throughout your training with the advancement and current level of your training being displayed on the Training Tower control panel for you to constantly keep track of. A great gift for any Star Wars fan, especially for kids…

Have you ever dreamed of moving an object with the power of your mind? Well Mattel’s Mindflex just makes that dream a reality now. You just need to put on a special headset and you’ll be ready to control the action as you never have before – with the power of your mind. By utilizing NeuroSky’s advanced ThinkGear technology, Mindflex reads your brainwave activity with the help of the wireless headset and translates that into action inside the game. The objective you have inside the Mindflex game sounds quite simple, you must navigate the ball through a mind-bending obstacle course as quickly as you can – traveling up and down, but you need to do that by using the power of your thoughts. You can customize the course with nine interchangeable obstacles making it possible to get hundreds of obstacle combinations so will never get boring to play.

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But how does this all work? Whenever you concentrate, you generate brainwave activity in your frontal lobes and Mindflex uses a variation of EEG technology to “read” the intensity of these brainwaves via a special sensors positioned on your forehead and ears (inside the headset). These sensors do not generate or interfere with brainwaves, they only read what is already there, so you can be rest assured if you have some worries about possible negative effect. Once the Mindflex headset recognizes your brainwaves, it transmits a signal to a fan within the base of the game and your brainwaves actually control the power of the fan which in turn levitates the ball. The more effectively you concentrate, the stronger the fan blows and the higher the ball floats and by relaxing your mind the fan lowers the airflow, which in turn lowers the ball. Sounds fun and it really is, especially for kids, but is also quite entertaining for adults too.

OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA) is an innovative device that allows you to control games and practically everything on your computer with your brain or more exactly with your thoughts and not only by them. You should have in mind that the NIA is not a complete replacement for your mouse or keyboard, but an additional accessory that can give you better control of your PC, but you may still need to use additional controllers for better functionality. What the Neural Impulse Actuator actually does is to translate electrical biosignals of your body directly into computer commands… these include brainwaves, eye and muscle movements. You can combine the readings of multiple bio signals by building a custom game profile so that a given thought can be translated to the PC as a fire command in the game (simulating the pressing of the left mouse button for instance). The NIA comes with some predefined profiles that will allow you to start learning how to use the device and then you can extend and make your own gaming profiles to achieve the best results.

You should have in mind that NIA is not an easy device to master, it will take you a lot of time and effort to learn how to adequately use the device at first, because it is something new and not as straightforward as a mouse or keyboard that requires just to press a given button. So controlling your PC with your thoughts is not as easy as you think, because you’ll have to learn to control the alpha and beta brainwaves that the device detects in a way, that they can be used for movement of your character in a game for instance. And that is the hardest part of learning to use the device, because gaining control of the eye and muscle movement detection by the device will require you just a few hours, but for the brainwaves functionality it could take you up to a few weeks.

For the moment OCZ NIA works just fine under Windows XP and Vista, but only in the 32-bit versions of these operating systems. There are already beta drivers available for 64-bit Vista OS, but if you are running 64-bit Windows XP you’ll not be able to use the NIA, so have that in mind before ordering the device. Also you should know that some users are experiencing problems with the device related to inadequate grounding of their computers or electromagnetic interferences, but these issues usually can be quickly solved by some reading and experimenting with the device. After all NIA is a the first very affordable commercial brain computer interface and you should be prepared for some unexpected things to happen, because that area of development is still quite new, but that makes the usage of the device even more fun and interesting, provided that you are willing to take that additional time. If you are not ready to experiment using this new cool gadget you better wait for some more time or just stick to using your mouse and keyboard for now… 😉

The current price of this innovative device is just $136.99 ($116.99 after $20.00 Mail-In Rebate at the moment!).